Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

List of Papers (Total 7,503)

A spinning, moving object, such as a football with a surface texture, combines motion signals from rotation and translation. The interaction between these two kinds of signal was studied psychophysically with moving, circular clouds of dots, which also could move within the cloud. If the cloud moved near-vertically downwards but the dots within it moved obliquely, the apparent path ...

Computational models that simulate individuals’ movements in pursuit-tracking tasks have been used to elucidate mechanisms of human motor control. Whilst there is evidence that individuals demonstrate idiosyncratic control-tracking strategies, it remains unclear whether models can be sensitive to these idiosyncrasies. Perceptual control theory (PCT) provides a unique model ...

Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(37), 15583–15587) found that people with high scores on the media-use questionnaire—a questionnaire that measures the proportion of media-usage time during which one uses more than one medium at the same time—show impaired performance on various tests of distractor ...

Previous work has demonstrated that increasing the number of distractors in a search array can reduce interference from distractor content during target processing. However, it is unclear how this reduced interference influences learning of target information. Here, we investigated how varying the amount and content of distraction present in a learning environment affects visual ...

Contextual cueing can be enhanced by reward. However, there is a debate if reward is associated with the repeated target–distractor configurations or with the repeated target locations that occur in both repeated and new displays. Based on neuroimaging evidence, we hypothesized that reward becomes associated with the target location only in new displays, but not in repeated ...

Previous research has shown that attentional selection is affected by reward contingencies: previously selected and rewarded stimuli continue to capture attention even if the reward contingencies are no longer in place. In the current study, we investigated whether attentional selection also is affected by stimuli that merely signal the magnitude of reward available on a given ...

Goodhew et al. (Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 79, 1147–1164, 2017) claim we (Skottun & Skoyles) hold: (1) that it is not possible to separate contributions from the magno- and parvocellular systems to psychophysical tasks, and (2) that there are no differences between magno- and parvocellular cells. Neither of these claims is correct.

In this study, we explore the automaticity of encoding for different facial characteristics and ask whether it is influenced by face familiarity. We used a matching task in which participants had to report whether the gender, identity, race, or expression of two briefly presented faces was the same or different. The task was made challenging by allowing nonrelevant dimensions to ...

Linkenauger, Witt, and Proffitt (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37(5), 1432–1441, 2011, Experiment 2) reported that right-handers estimated objects as smaller if they intended to grasp them in their right rather than their left hand. Based on the action-specific account, they argued that this scaling effect occurred because participants ...

People often have to make decisions based on many pieces of information. Previous work has found that people are able to integrate values presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) stream to make informed judgements on the overall stream value (Tsetsos et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(24), 9659–9664, 2012). It ...

Performance in rapid serial visual presentation tasks has been shown to depend on the temporal integration of target stimuli when they are presented in direct succession. Temporal target integration produces a single, combined representation of visually compatible stimuli, which is comparatively easy to identify. It is currently unknown to what extent target compatibility affects ...

Attentional selection depends on the interaction between exogenous (stimulus-driven), endogenous (goal-driven), and selection history (experience-driven) factors. While endogenous and exogenous biases have been widely investigated, less is known about their interplay with value-driven attention. The present study investigated the interaction between reward-history and goal-driven ...

People with higher IQ scores also tend to perform better on elementary cognitive-perceptual tasks, such as deciding quickly whether an arrow points to the left or the right Jensen (2006). The worst performance rule (WPR) finesses this relation by stating that the association between IQ and elementary-task performance is most pronounced when this performance is summarized by ...

Humans are remarkably efficient in detecting highly familiar object categories in natural scenes, with evidence suggesting that such object detection can be performed in the (near) absence of attention. Here we systematically explored the influences of both spatial attention and category-based attention on the accuracy of object detection in natural scenes. Manipulating both types ...

There is limited evidence regarding the accuracy of inferences about intention. The research described in this article shows how perceptual control theory (PCT) can provide a “ground truth” for these judgments. In a series of 3 studies, participants were asked to identify a person’s intention in a tracking task where the person’s true intention was to control the position of a knot ...

Although many studies have explored the relation between reaction time (RT) and loudness, including effects of intensity, frequency, and binaural summation, comparable work on spectral summation is rare. However, most real-world sounds are not pure tones and typically have bandwidths covering several critical bands. Since comparing to a 1-kHz pure tone, the reference tone, is ...

Recent evidence shows that distractors that signal high compared to low reward availability elicit stronger attentional capture, even when this is detrimental for task-performance. This suggests that simply correlating stimuli with reward administration, rather than their instrumental relationship with obtaining reward, produces value-driven attentional capture. However, in ...

Observers are able to resume an interrupted search trial faster relative to responding to a new, unseen display. This finding of rapid resumption is attributed to short-term perceptual hypotheses generated on the current look and confirmed upon subsequent looks at the same display. It has been suggested that the contents of perceptual hypotheses are similar to those of other forms ...

One of the factors contributing to a seamless visual experience is object correspondence—that is, the integration of pre- and postsaccadic visual object information into one representation. Previous research had suggested that before the execution of a saccade, a target object is loaded into visual working memory and subsequently is used to locate the target object after the ...

There is growing evidence that enhanced sensitivity to painful clinical procedures and chronic pain are related to greater sensitivity to other sensory inputs, such as bitter taste. We examined cross-modal sensitivities in two studies. Study 1 assessed associations between bitter taste sensitivity, pain tolerance, and fear of pain in 48 healthy young adults. Participants were ...

Blindwalking to replicate an instructed distance requires various sensory signals. Recent evidence in movement science across many organisms suggests that multifractal organization of connective tissue supports the use of these signals. Multifractal structure is a multiplicity of power laws defining distribution of proportion across many time scales that helps predict judgments of ...